How To Revive Old Content to Attract New Readers

Forgotten Treasures

All successful publishers eventually run into the same problem: they amass a lot of amazing content that their growing body of readers never think to read.

Different types of publishers have different versions of this problem.

A quarterly publication may have archived a decade’s worth of back issues that new readers overlook. A news source, on the other hand, may simply have published so many articles in a week that browsers either overlook some or get overwhelmed and give up.

Fortunately, this problem has an easy solution: special editions.

Depths For the Scholars, Highlights For Skimmers

That’s why they publish The Weekender. The Weekender is a weekly round-up of the top headlines. New editions go live on Friday and a simplebanner at the top of the homepage directs readers to it until Sunday.

All back editions are available on a dedicated page. Easy to find and easy to read, The Weekender is a great feature that expands the pool of potential readers to include those who just want the highlights.

Special Doesn’t Mean Difficult

The best part about The Weekender is that it’s incredibly easy to create. The iPolitics site was built with IssueM, which means that putting together a special edition is as simple as clicking on the desired articles. Check the right boxes in the back-end and voila! The Weekender is born:

In fact, iPolitics isn’t the only publication that takes advantage of this feature. The Practice is a periodical publication of Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession. They publish a volume a year, with several issues per volume.

And whenever they publish a new issue, they also feature an archived issue, reviving content that new readers may have missed with the click of a button.

Special editions make it easy to show readers the depth of your publication’s value. And IssueM makes it easy to publish special editions.